“They found it”: The artists Patti Smith called her musical descendants
The only hope that any musician can have is to inspire those that came after them. Even if their music doesn’t connect with the masses in the way they think it should, the true way that anyone lasts is for someone to keep preaching their words long after they are gone. While Patti Smith has solidified herself as one of the greatest artists and poets of her generation, she felt that two artists were the reasons why her music would live on.
Because looking back on how she approached rock and roll, Smith wasn’t looking to impress anyone. She was born in the same New York scene that birthed acts like The Velvet Underground, and while not everything was meant to be the cleanest recording, anyone could tell the emotion in her voice the minute she started singing her version of ‘Gloria’ or managed to make a spiritual exercise from the ground up on ‘Land’.
After all, she was more of a poet than a musician half the time, and most of her words have lived on for generations to come. On an album like Horses, hearing her talking about Jesus not dying for her sins or describing the feeling of someone coming back from their parent’s funeral and having to unpackage the emotion that comes with never seeing them again is still some of the heaviest pieces of rock history.
Although the rock scene would eventually be knee-deep in arena rock and prog-rock, the true fans were listening by the time the 1980s kicked in. When the alternative scene started exploding, it wasn’t out of the question for a band like The Smiths to pull from her influences, especially with Morrissey’s fascination with poets like Keats and Yeats and ignoring his reputation for being one of the most unlikeable people in modern music.
Even if ‘The Moz’ was too much for someone to take in, Michael Stipe managed to take things in the opposite direction. Despite forming REM based on a conversation with Peter Buck about Smith’s first four records, half the reason why Stipe’s lyrics work so well is because of him channelling the deepest parts of his soul, which may as well have been his own version of what Smith was doing at the start of her career.
So while her records may not have sold in droves the same way that her contemporaries did, Smith said that she used her songs as a vehicle for both frontmen, saying, “They were my people. They were exactly the people I had in mind. I wrote Horses for Michael Stipe. I wrote Horses for Morrissey. And they found it.”
And it’s not only the alternative crowd that picked up on what Smith was saying. Although it’s easy to get wrapped up in the proto-punk adventures that happen on the record, her work as a writer has helped open people’s eyes to what was going on in the background, with Just Kids being a natural extension of her early career by telling the story of the fresh-faced New Yorker trying to find her place and eventually finding a confidante in Robert Mapplethorpe.
Because rock and roll isn’t about making the loudest music possible for Smith. It’s about the freedom of expression, and as long as people are willing to stick their necks out to say what they want to say, there were still be those coming back to Horses and seeing the sheer brilliance on display.
